Blog Post

Ludum Dare #29 Complete

A few weeks ago, I participated in the 29th Ludum Dare. It has been a while, but not many posts, since I last participated in the Dare. The theme for this one was "Beneath the Surface".

I worked with Justin Britch on this one. We met just after the theme was announced to brainstorm. I really liked this theme - it evokes mystery and exploration, provides an easy setting (underground or underwater) to start with, and could simultaneously be tied into gameplay elements. While we thought it would have been a lot of fun to make "Ben Eath, the Surf Ace", we ultimately decided that we really wanted to go after the mystery, the thrill of exploration, fear of the unknown, and such themes. We also knew that we wanted to attempt to introduce some sort of narrative into the world.

The beginnings of the conversation system.

The design was ambitiously scoped for a jam, and I'm happy I was able to turn out so many features.

More conversation.

The Good: Dedicating time during the development process for polish worked well for the game. When polish gets left as a task for the end of the jam, there's often no time to actually do it. I didn't leave a feature until it was in a state it could stay in.

I also didn't run into too many momentum-killer problems. I've worked on several smaller projects using HTML5 and ThreeJS over the past few months, so I knew some of its quirks and was able to work continuously without getting stuck on strange bugs, even though the codebase for Thunder Fish pushed way past the size of my previous HTML games. Familiarity is key for jams, and it definitely pays off in the ability to continue grinding out features.

Learned: Yet again, I completely failed to allocate time for audio. Fortunately, I was already in the Jam category for this one, so I pulled some free music from NGXmusical in the last hour. Sound effects could have improved the feel even further, though.